Tag Archives: walt disney

I can’t wait for Disney World to reopen. Once it does, it will feel as some normalcy will have returned to our nation, not ignoring what has gone on these past 3 months or even the past several weeks. I know that there are angry people everywhere, some rightfully so. Even when visiting the happiest place on earth people get cranky, but it does seem that we all get along or try to get along when visiting Disney World. I am so excited, that I have created a countdown clock below for when the parks reopen. Enjoy!

Have you ever been to Epcot in Disney World? Many of us have. If you haven’t been to Epcot, you probably have been to Disneyland or the other parts of Disney World. For adults, Epcot seems to be the most popular of the four parks at Disney World.

1. Are you a baby boomer?

I am a baby boomer. I grew up with Walt Disney coming into our homes weekly. I remember Walt promoting Epcot, the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. Walt was at the point in his life where he had acquired success in the movie industry and Disneyland. He was ready to apply these successes to a much bigger project. He was a dreamer and was interested in new technology, just as he had learned to blend this new technology into his movies. Disneyland had many innovations; the monorail, the WED people mover and all of the automation required to keep the parks going. Walt was now ready to try his hand at finding like-minded people in all types of vocations. He wanted to find dreamers who would push the envelope to find new ways of doing things.

2. Epcot was a promise of a greater future

As Walt was getting older, thinking of the cities his grandchildren would grow up in, He saw what was happening to many of our large cities, between the crime, pollution and poorly designed communities. Walt wanted Epcot to be his attempt at developing the city of the future, different than what many American cities were becoming.

Above is an early artist rendering of what Epcot would look like.
Its purpose was to be a “real city that would ‘never cease to be a blueprint of the future,” designed to stimulate American ideas for urban living.

3. The success of Disneyland gave birth to many ideas in Epcot

Realizing that he and his Imagineers had learned a good number of things in the development of Disneyland, they could be put to use in planning communities, and perhaps even cities. Walt began to immerse himself in books about city planning, such as Ebenezer Howard‘s Garden Cities of To-morrow.This had a significant influence on Walt’s design for the Epcot he had dreamed about.

4. You remember Walt’s 25-minute talk about Disney World

A recording on October 27, 1966, less than two months before Disney’s death, was a 25-minute film about his plans for the Florida Project, then dubbed “Disney World.” Epcot was supposed to be the central attraction. Walt showed the radial design of the city using his long pointing stick to describe this new Florida Project.As you can see at the top of the picture is Epcot. Before the public was made aware of Epcot, it was called Project X by Disney’s team.

5. The space race of the 1960s

Many of us remember seeing rocket launches during school, especially the momentous ones, like the first Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions. If you were alive during Apollo 11, you know where you were when Neil Armstrong placed his foot on the lunar surface. All of the technology that went into the space race was set before our eyes. Walt’s company had even been contracted to produce animated films about space travel and what the future might look like for humans. Tomorrowland in Epcot was an extension of what the world was experiencing, in a theme park venue. Going to Tomorrowland in Epcot didn’t feel that foreign to most of us, because we had been a part of this technology revolution if only observers.

I don’t know about you, but the dreams that Walt had were shared with us before Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color each Sunday evening had been planted like a seed within me. There wasn’t anything that I couldn’t do. If man could go to the moon and Walt was going to build a city of the future, then why would I limit myself for my future? Some people might say that I am ignoring all of the problems that we are facing in the world today. But, I simply choose to focus on the future with the hope that I can be a part of making it better than it is now, that my excitement that I share isn’t too far off from what Walt must have felt. Here’s to you Walt, let’s get this thing built!

I read somewhere that if you were in the midst of trying to discover where you wanted to go in life, then you should look retrospectively on your imagined life. Sounds kind of strange doesn’t it? So many times, when we try and think of what we want to become or do in life, we subconsciously place all kinds of limitations on it. We don’t realize many times that we are doing this. We somehow use the successes and the failures of our past to place mental leashes on our dreams. Since we live in the real world, that play world that we lived in as kids slowly disappears as life slaps us in the face. Bit by bit, we stop dreaming during the day; sure we dream at night, but daydreaming just stops. My teachers used to write to my parents on my report card that I daydreamed too much in class.

I will admit that I did daydream in class. I had so many things that I wanted to become and had quite a vivid imagination. Imagination is very underrated. It is necessary for the advancement of almost any discipline or task we put our hands to. If it wasn’t for imagination, the wheel would never had been invented, much less self driving cars.

After thinking of the challenge put before me, I knew that it was going to take some effort since I hadn’t done this in quite awhile. Most of my daydreaming of late had taken on a very pragmatic nature. Dreaming like I did when I was a kid was going to be a task.

Ground rules for daydreaming

First off, there are some rules you have to keep in mind or rather non-rules. Keep these in mind as you start daydreaming.

If money were not an object

If there were no time constraints

Throw every pragmatic or logical assumption out the window

Let your dream have absolutely no boundaries

Nothing is silly or stupid

Don’t judge your dream even before you get started

To hell with thoughts like “it’ll never happen so why dream it”

Don’t be afraid to even include friends and associates that you have enjoyed working with in the past in your dream

Once you have come up with your dream, write it down amping it up even more

To get you started, I am going to share my wild, no holds barred dream. As I said, this is a retrospective dream, looking back on my imaginary life. Here we go, don’t judge me!

My daydream – an example

“I can’t believe where I am today. At one time, I felt as though God had forgotten why He created me, but now I see that it was to prepare me for where I am today.

It started long ago. All of my life’s experiences created skills that were necessary to prepare me for this. I thought that I was only created to do one thing, but God showed me He created me to do many things, not just one thing. I was always interested in Rocketry. Little did I know that I would discover anti-gravity. This allowed man to escape earth’s gravitational pull without the use of millions of pounds of thrust. We were able to lift more payloads to space using the space that once was used for propellant to hold mission critical payload. After we escaped earth’s gravity, my team, using photon power, propelled the spacecraft to light speed, enabling man to explore new worlds that were once impossible to reach.

Anti-gravity also has commercial success as hover boards, passenger planes and other gravity bound products that suddenly “took off”. Tires on cars are a thing of the past. With my profits from anti-gravity, I was able to finally create Walt Disney’s Epcot. It is a place where the most creative minds live and work to create things that benefit mankind. It is not an amusement park, it is what the original plan for Epcot was supposed to be.

The friendships that I created came out of retirement to pull together to make the vision a reality. Steve Story is our corporate attorney who oversees our legal department. Phillip Shucet has found civil engineers like Gary Mackey to create the structure and thoroughfares in Epcot. Jim Tomlinson heads up the hospital. Mike Padden heads up our architectural department. Laurie, my wife makes sure that my creative thinking time is undisturbed. She heads up the ice rink as well as the culinary school.

We now have hologram vision, another invention of mine that beams the picture from your TV into your living room. Fortunately the FCC keeps bad content from jumping into people’s living rooms!

I have a weekly TV show called “Don’t Stop Dreaming”. I found out in my 60’s that acquiring stuff wasn’t important, acquiring dreams was more important. I had stopped asking “What if…” but one day I decided to rekindle my imagination and let it go wild. It had been so long that the rusty gears took awhile to get going, but once they did, they started spinning like a top. Something in my life had jammed the gears, but now they were making up for lost time. I couldn’t stop the ideas from flowing. It was as if God was birthing new ideas in me every day. I said that I wanted to be used and was I ever! There were a lot of obstacles along the way, but with God’s help and a faithful team of dreamers, doors kept opening. A half century ago, I felt as if God had whispered in my ear that He was going to use me for something extraordinary, and let’s just say, it has been far more extraordinary than I could have dreamed.”

Ok, that was my dream. What is yours? You may have no idea. First you have to learn to daydream again. Learning to daydream, using your imagination is not as easy as it once was when we were younger. It’s going to take a little bit of practice. I do this best when I am in a quiet place with paper and pen.

Walt said “EPCOT will be an experimental prototype community of tomorrow that will take its cue from the new ideas and new technologies that are now emerging from the creative centers of American industry. It will be a community of tomorrow that will never be completed, but will always be introducing and testing and demonstrating new materials and systems. And EPCOT will always be a showcase to the world for the ingenuity and imagination of American free enterprise.”

I’ve wanted to be a part of Walt’s original EPCOT idea since I heard about it. I remember in October of 1966, just 2 months before Walt’s death, Walt airing his whole EPCOT idea. What a concept I thought. I want to be a part of this. In 1966, Nasa was in the midst of the Apollo program, eventually headed to the moon. Walt wanted to play a part in it, if nothing else, to get people excited through his animation team explaining the dream to America. What Walt really wanted was to see what the brightest minds of our country could come up with. Walt saw the advances that science was making. As scientists, first there has to be an idea, an aha moment, then the testing of the hypothesis, and finally the creation. EPCOT was going to try and bring together the brightest minds as well as those with incredible imagination. Brad Bird, the director of ‘Tomorrowland’, the Disney movie about a boy that invented a rocket pack that ended up in a sort of EPCOT, was a tribute to the original EPCOT idea.

Fast forward 50 years to today. With Elon Musk’s ‘The Boring Company’, he could actually use this company to accomplish the underground roads that Walt’s crew conceived to keep traffic out of the city. Elon seems to be echoing many of the thoughts that Walt had, creating underground tunnels to mitigate traffic in high congestion areas, primarily in EPCOT. Musk’s new company hopes to increase the speed of these tunnel boring machines 10 fold to reduce the cost of the whole tunnel boring process.

Walt also saw the direction that our cities were headed and wanted to build a city that showed what was possible, for those that wanted something different, something that was forward thinking. Elon has also said that he wants to do something to stop our dependence on fossil fuels, thus helping with climate change. This is forward thinking, not just thinking about the present, but to the future.

It’s obvious that Hyperloop, one of Elon’s other projects could also be integral to a modern day EPCOT. It would be Walt’s version of the WED PeopleMover on steroids. I actually had this idea when I worked at a fossil fuel testing facility 30 years ago. I’m glad that Elon is pulling this off. We can use low pressure air to move pods, much like the drive through bank teller pods that you put your money in to make a deposit. This would be a great way to get people in the city to the place they need to go.

Creating EPCOT would be a small scale prototype city, one that if it works on a small scale could be applied to larger cities. If the main purpose of this new EPCOT would is to be an incubator of ideas, it would hopefully spurn other cities to follow this lead. Instead of declining cities and wringing our hands about the future, it would put a more hopeful slant on our existence, being excited about what would be thought of next. Heck, EPCOT could stand for Elon’s Prototype Community of Tomorrow.

I realize that I’m not the first person to make this connection, but maybe if enough of us keep planting this bug in Elon Musk’s team, they may realize that there is some merit to it.

I’ve often thought that maybe there would be enough people out there who wanted to see this become a reality and to put together a ‘Go Fund Me’ site, but really a ‘Go Fund EPCOT’ site. If the likes of Elon Musk or Richard Branson, who are billionaires don’t think that creating the original concept of EPCOT is for them, maybe the rest of us who do believe that there is merit to the idea could create a collective entity that is funded by individuals like you and me. Sounds far fetched, but then again isn’t that what EPCOT was in the first place?

Thoughts today on Tomorrowland

There’s a great big beautiful tomorrow,
Shining at the end of every day.
There’s a great big beautiful tomorrow,
And tomorrow’s just a dream away.

Tomorrowland is a place that most of us know in Disneyland and Disneyworld. It’s also the name of a movie directed by Brad Bird. The story created by Damon Lindelof, Jeff Jensen and Brad Bird asks “What happened to our “anything’s possible” spirit?” The movie picks up where Tomorrowland at Disneyland left off. When Walt left this earth, man had not yet landed on the moon. We had passed through the Mercury and Gemini missions and were deep into the Apollo missions, yet we still had not reached the moon. Man was launched into space for the first time to orbit the earth in 1961. We landed on the moon in 1969, only 8 years after figuring out how to even get a man to orbit the earth, not bad for such a short time period. In 1964, I attended the NY World’s Fair. It was quite an experience. It sported all of the achievements and future hopes of what the world’s inventors, artists and businesses had accomplished up until that time as well as exhibits that teased us by showing what should be possible in the future. It was a great time of pride for our nation.

We were racing the Russians to the moon. The economy was growing and most families were able to survive by just one wage earner working; though there wasn’t much extra to spare. America wasn’t perfect, we had racial upheaval and growing pains that left a lot of scars, but there was hope, even in the midst of the conflict in Vietnam.

In regards to Disney’s Tomorrowland, Walt said,
“Tomorrow can be a wonderful age. Our scientists today are opening the doors of the Space Age to achievements that will benefit our children and generations to come. The Tomorrowland attractions in Epcot have been designed to give you an opportunity to participate in adventures that are a living blueprint of our future.”
Walt was very interested in the future. He was a man who didn’t understand the meaning of the word “can’t”. He was always asking “what if” which is probably why he built a Tomorrowland in the first place.

Brad Bird and his other two co-writers wanted to expand on this question. “What if there was another dimension where that world never stopped believing in “what if”. It is a story about people who keep “what if” alive in their hearts. Casey, played by Britt Robertson is a young student and daughter of a NASA engineer, Eddie Newton played by Tim McGraw. Casey has that type of “what if” spirit. She is chosen by Athena, played by Raffey Cassidy to return to the other dimension of our world to save their world by using her “what if” mentality to return them back to hope and world peace. Casey isn’t the first person who exhibited this hope, Frank Walker, played by George Clooney was a young boy that was chosen also by Athena, (an android human), but due to Frank’s discovering that the world was going to end and giving up hope, he was banished years ago from Tomorrowland (the other dimension of our world). Frank is bitter for having been banished, sitting in his dooms day room waiting for the 56 days left prior to the world ending as we know it. Athena has hope that Casey has enough of what Frank used to have, enough to save the world. Casey is led to Frank by Athena in order to use Frank’s knowledge to return to Tomorrowland.

I won’t spoil the end, in case you have never seen the movie. For some reason, I really like the spirit of this movie. We live in an era where wars, terrorism, social injustice and political upheaval seem to dominate our thinking more than “what if”. The protagonist David Nix, played by Hugh Laurie has some great lines below:

“Let’s imagine… if you glimpsed the future, you were frightened by what you saw, what would you do with that information? You would go to… the politicians, captains of industry? And how would you convince them? Data? Facts? Good luck! The only facts they won’t challenge are the ones that keep the wheels greased and the dollars rolling in. But what if… what if there was a way of skipping the middle man and putting the critical news directly into everyone’s head? The probability of wide-spread annihilation kept going up. The only way to stop it was to show it. To scare people straight. Because, what reasonable human being wouldn’t be galvanized by the potential destruction of everything they’ve ever known or loved? To save civilization, I would show its collapse. But, how do you think this vision was received? How do you think people responded to the prospect of imminent doom? They gobbled it up like a chocolate eclair! They didn’t fear their demise, they re-packaged it. It could be enjoyed as video-games, as TV shows, books, movies, the entire world wholeheartedly embraced the apocalypse and sprinted towards it with gleeful abandon. Meanwhile, your Earth was crumbling all around you. You’ve got simultaneous epidemics of obesity and starvation. Explain that one! Bees and butterflies start to disappear, the glaciers melt, algae blooms. All around you the coal mine canaries are dropping dead and you won’t take the hint! In every moment there’s the possibility of a better future, but you people won’t believe it. And because you won’t believe it you won’t do what is necessary to make it a reality. So, you dwell on this terrible future. You resign yourselves to it for one reason, because *that* future does not ask anything of you today. So yes, we saw the iceberg and warned the Titanic. But you all just steered for it anyway, full steam ahead. Why? Because you want to sink! You gave up! That’s not the monitor’s fault. That’s yours.”

So, I have a question for all of us, do we want to sink? Have we given up? Is it easier to not resist and to do nothing than to change our world? I for one, choose not to give up. What have we been doing since 1969 when we landed on the moon? It’s as if we won the Olympic Gold medal and now were ready to live the easy life and sign on to all of the corporate sponsorships, no more training and working for that gold medal. As Peter Thiel said so succinctly, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” Big whoop! Our dreams have shrunk. Who cares about another new Iphone or Windows update. We need big dreams! Maybe it’s because we have put God in the attic of our world home. I believe that God put those big dreams in our heads, or at least gave us the brainpower to figure it out. Now our nation is into political correctness. You can’t even mention God without getting in to trouble in our schools or government. What do you think that God is thinking when we say as a nation, “Sorry God, we don’t really want you involved anymore. Life is too complicated, you wouldn’t understand.” Well, God isn’t pushy. He will simply say. “Ok, I will let you be.” Many of you reading may be saying, “Oh brother, here is some guy pushing religion on me.” Actually I am not. I’m just putting that thought out there. Is it possible that all of these inventions and accomplishments in the 60’s weren’t 100% dreamed up just by ourselves? I don’t know about you, but I need all of the help that I can get! Our world needs all the help it can get.

If we believe that tomorrow can be better than today, that is a good place to start. If we believe that things will never improve, then we have thrown in the towel. It’s easy to throw in the towel. It doesn’t require anything of us. In the movie Tomorrowland, there is a story that Casey shares, a take off on the Native American Cherokee proverb: “There are two wolves and they are always fighting. One is darkness and despair. The other is light and hope. Which wolf wins? ……Whichever one you feed.”
Which wolf will you feed today?